Ep. 73: Zooming In on Innovative Global Education with Brantley Turner
Transcript:
Melissa Milner 0:09
Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. I'm your host Melissa Milner, a teacher who is painfully curious and very easily inspired. This podcast is ever changing and I hope with each season, you find episodes that speak to you in your work as an educator. This is the fourth season of The Teacher As... and it's exciting to see the growth in how many educators are listening. Episodes are released every other week. If you enjoy The Teacher As... please rate it on Apple podcasts and leave a review. It helps the podcast reach more educators. Thanks for listening.
Brantley Turner 0:41
It's such a pleasure to be with you today. My name is Brantley Turner. And I was a long term resident of mainland China in Shanghai. At the moment, I'm in New York and working at the Dwight School here in New York, both teaching and serving as the Director of East Asia education. So Dwight has schools around the world, but three schools in Asia, Seoul, Shanghai, and we are in the process of launching Dwight school Hanoi, in Vietnam. And so I will be relocating to Hanoi sometime early next year.
Melissa Milner 1:13
Okay, wow. I think if we could kind of do a little journey back into how did you end up doing what you're doing now? Where did you start? Did you start in education? Did you start in some other career? Like, what is your journey?
Brantley Turner 1:32
So my journey really is a story of having an opportunity to move abroad from the United States to Asia. And it was really just taking advantage of opportunities that came up. So I grew up in New York, and I didn't travel a lot over abroad, that wasn't a part of my, my childhood. My father's from Alabama, and my mom's from Tennessee. So I spent a lot of time going south to be with relatives. And then when I was just about to graduate from high school, my parents actually moved from New York to Hong Kong. So that was a radical sort of new opportunity in the family. And I started spending time in China as a result of their move. I was about to go to college, so I didn't move with them. But that opened up that world of opportunity to me, and I hate to say it, but to be honest, I'm not sure I knew Beijing was the capital of China when my parents first moved to Asia. So it was a complete journey of discovery. So I always was interested in working in education. But I can talk later about why those opportunities were limited or constrained when I first started going to China. So I've done a lot of different jobs. I had a lot of interesting experiences, but ultimately, back to education, which is something that I always wanted to be involved in.
Melissa Milner 2:44
Yes. So when you started in education, did you start as a teacher?
Brantley Turner 2:50
So my first education, I always worked, I was a camp counselor, I was a TA in college, those were kind of areas of education that I enjoyed and, you know, ultimately contributed to my interest in entering the profession. I did teach English as my first official job in China. I'm not very good at it. And it was really hard. I do have a TEFL, I have a TEFL certificate, etc. But I was teaching adults English and at the time, so this was the mid 90s, the options were teaching in an international school for foreign passport holders, children, those schools are called officially, the schools for the children of foreign workers. That's a very specific path. And and the reality is that those teachers are licensed teachers from the United States who studied education. And that wasn't my path. Right? And then the other side was teaching English and just kind of, "Hey, are you a foreigner, great, we'll stick you in a classroom with 60 people and just give you a textbook, maybe here's some chalk, go for it." And so those were the options I got out of that. And I worked in advertising, and I worked in market research. And again, my path was pursuing an understanding of China. So it was using Mandarin at work was a really big priority for me, I can speak and read and write Chinese. I studied graduate school in China. So I really wanted to put those skills to the test. And that is what kind of set me on my path. And I can talk a little bit more about the teaching of why I came back to it too.
Melissa Milner 4:22
You ended up landing with this amazing how does it pronounce Sino? Sino?
Brantley Turner 4:30
It is Sino foreign is really the way to say China, right. So they call it Sino, you know, that's just the official name.
Melissa Milner 4:39
Yeah, I had to google it because on your sheet it said Sino US and I'm like that must be China US kind of together, but I had no idea. So that's where you ended up settling right and doing...like being the principal of this school.
Brantley Turner 4:54
So here's how that came about. So I after I did kind of what I would call my more corporate management, sector jobs, I then well, around 2005, my then boyfriend now husband started spending a lot more time in the US. He's American, and we met in China. But we were kind of having to try to figure out how to straddle both New York and Shanghai. And what that led to was me sort of saying, you know, the Olympics are coming to China in 2008, the Shanghai Expo is coming in 2010. I've had all of these experiences in market research, particularly focused on youth in China, what are going what's going to be a way for me to connect young people overseas with young people in China, because people to people dialogue, to me is everything. And I started a small organization called China Prep, really, with the objective of bringing school groups and running programs for young people to come to China. So did that from 2008 until 2014. And work with all sorts of different groups. I mean, you know, just different kids signing up for trips that we ran directly working with nonprofits and NGOs to put together groups of principals and teachers and students from different schools across the United States to come. And then also just working with schools, I both in Europe and in the US to create programs with a Chinese teacher, a history teacher, to bring students and that was just fantastic. I mean, that was a way to see how young people were connecting with each other. We also ran some programs for young Chinese students to come to the US, which was, which was great. And that was how I then got connected to Dwight.
Brantley Turner 6:32
So in 2008, I ran a trip for Dwight, to China, we traveled was with our history teacher, we explored met local students. And I started to get to know the school through that and then got involved with a lot of other things that Dwight had going on. So that was my pathway to more we'll call it formal education, I guess. But it really started on the experiential side. And I still try to maintain a lot of that. And in my values as an educator, just getting kids connecting and team building and talking about complicated things.
Melissa Milner 7:00
Oh, that's pretty amazing. I actually had Luke Liddle on a few, a few episodes ago. And he does international travel to London, you know, having groups come and so that was a really interesting, just all of that, you know, people from different areas, just the team building, that that whole social piece is so cool. And it just, hopefully will help us in the future.
Brantley Turner 7:26
Unfortunately, yeah, it's a tricky piece, right. So you may recall, Obama had an initiative called 100,000 Strong when he was in office. And that was really about trying to say, look, you've got at least 300,000 Chinese national students coming each year to study in the United States. And can we, as you know, the US get to 100,000 students, but we didn't, and I get it right. And I understand why it's so complex, but at the same time, advocating for dialogue, to me is the only solution. Right, we are talking about the two largest economies in the world, significant global powers. And if we aren't talking to each other, then we got a serious problem.
Melissa Milner 8:06
Yeah. So, I see all over your, you know, when I google you, like, look at your, you know, expert guests sheets, and I just see innovative education, innovative education, innovative education. So what does that look like in your world? Like, what do you mean by innovative education?
Brantley Turner 8:23
It's a great question. And you know, the term innovative and innovation is so ahh like, can be cloying, you know, sort of what in the world does that mean, to have a title that says innovation? I mean, what are you doing wrong? Right, all of us should be trying to innovate all the time. And for me, I think what that looks like in the context in which I worked, so I started the school in China, the sino us independent, cooperatively run high school, it's the only school of its kind in China. And it's all about threading the needle for me. So it's understanding the macro regulatory landscape, what is possible within your context. And then when you understand deeply what is possible within your context, how do you push the envelope to try to maximize what that opportunities can look like for students? So to me innovative number one is about understanding context. And I think it's incredibly important. I've never been involved with the idea that we have Western education, and we will impose Western education directly with no customization on a local home country population. One of the major misconceptions about international education globally is that it's somehow international students doing it. The reality is that the majority of so called international schools serve home country populations of students. Right. So in my case at Qibao Dwight, we served Chinese national students, but anyone could come to the school we were open to all but the reality is that you may have a situation where you know, you it was a better fit if you were a Chinese national. So, innovation to me starts with understanding context, threading the needle to make things happen that maybe sometimes other folks just think are too hard.
Melissa Milner 10:03
Yeah, I mean, especially in China.
Brantley Turner 10:06
So it is complex in that there are a lot of regulations, there are a lot of restrictions. But at the same time, there's a huge appetite for global education. So you see all those numbers that we just referenced of students coming abroad to study, you see an interest in higher education in English language, you see an interest in spending time outside of China. And the reality is that that isn't every country, not every country of students is saying, How do I go seek a different alternative education experience? And so I think that the while yes, there's a lot of complexity. At the same time, education is so highly valued, that people are really ready to listen, I'll give a funny kind of anecdote. I always say, you know, if I'm in like a cocktail party in New York and say, what do you do? I'm teaching high school, little politics. You know, I was a principal people like, Oh, that's nice. You know, in China, it's like, you're the VIP, at a party people like, how do I help my kid? What do I do? What can I learn from you?
Melissa Milner 11:13
Oh, wow.
Brantley Turner 11:14
Yeah, it's a very different reality. So you also felt like there was a lot of time for understanding different approaches, whether it be parenting, education, you know, parents learning about how to parent or young people, and you can look at some of that as how to get ahead. A lot of people in China. But it's not just that traditionally, there's a value around education in Asia, that's very powerful.
Melissa Milner 11:36
Yes. So I just want to get my brain around this, because it seems so overwhelming to me. So you had all those years just living in China? Obviously, you know, the language, you can write it, you can say it, you can speak it? You can, you know, read it, and how do you have meetings with the government, like what I mean, what went on to get this going?
Brantley Turner 11:59
Okay, as I started working with Dwight, on the travel programs, we had an opportunity in Beijing to run a pilot program at a public high school. So we got to embed the first school to school direct partnership pilot in Beijing, I joined working on that team in 2009. And just learned, right, observe what was good, what was not good. We were observing teachers, both international and Chinese national teachers giving feedback helping the management of the program, none of us from Dwight were on the ground permanently at the Beijing program, because again, it was a pilot, and we got to sort of advise, so that was six years, and I spent a lot of time learning. I mean, it was a great opportunity. Like, I've always kind of felt like a to use a big word like an auto ethnographer. Like I tried to put myself in the headspace of I'm always in research mode. Like, I'm always, you know, I'm feeling frustrations, and I'm dealing with challenges, but I'm looking at it as like what is going on from a research perspective. So Beijing was a great training ground, wonderful professional development, and just got to learn, listen, see talk to talk to wonderful educators and go from there. So in 2014, we opened the doors at Qibao Dwight, but in 2012, we got an introduction to the public high school in Shanghai that was trying to open it so Qibao high school. So when you see the name Qibao Dwight, Qibao is a place in Shanghai, it's part of town, but it's also one of the kind of key schools they're called. So one of the high achieving test in public high schools in the city. So just a brief background. In 2003, there was a policy put forward in China for cooperatively run education, and the idea is bring in international education groups, and schools to partner with Chinese institutions to grow together. So the most high profile one that a lot of folks know about outside is NYU. So New York University has a cooperatively run University in Shanghai. When that got established, the Shanghai Education Commission, which was like the Ministry of Education for Shanghai, wanted to do a high school. Hence, I was working on this Dwight project, Qibao was this public high school that wanted to do a project, we got put together, and I won't go into all the details, but that's where it started.
Melissa Milner 14:14
Okay, so you didn't go as this one woman and say, I'm going to start school in China, okay.
Brantley Turner 14:19
A nonprofit organization in New York called Asia Society was trying to support the Shanghai Education Commission and finding partners that work together. They knew me personally because I had run trips for their students in the ISSN network from so it was there was a personal element to it, but also, of course, much larger forces because we are a nonprofit school and we're government funded.
Melissa Milner 14:41
So it was within a sort of a structure that you were able to break into this whole thing.
Brantley Turner 14:48
No, and that's what I mean by sort of recognizing from 2003 to 2013 not one high school had gotten started.
Melissa Milner 14:55
Yeah.
Brantley Turner 14:56
Right. So it was sort of saying what's going on and with the Chinese partners sort of saying Where's that opportunity? And why isn't this Why isn't this happening?
Melissa Milner 15:03
Yeah, that's fascinating. I tend to like to talk about the arts. And I know you know, your wording is"cutting edge arts program."So I definitely want to hear about that.
Brantley Turner 15:15
I'm going to come back to context. So first of all, just to like qualify myself, I guess, in undergrad, I was a East Asian Studies and art semiotics major. And I really come with Brown University letter, they have a semiotics department with it.
Melissa Milner 15:32
What's semiotics?
Brantley Turner 15:34
Think about it like visual code, so you know that linguistics like linguistics is language codes, right?
Melissa Milner 15:40
Yes.
Brantley Turner 15:40
Semiotics is visual code. So for example, if you see a picture of a phone, why do you know what's what's phone? Good, we could get into some heavy stuff with this, right. But the reality of it is that I as a, as an individual was learning intensive Mandarin, East Asian Studies, foreign policy side of things, and was taking documentary production classes and art related classes to stay sane. And I am a total believer, I was raised to believe you must have a creative outlet at all times through your academic journey. It is how you process. So an example would be my senior year of college, I made a documentary ish film with slides about Deng Xiaoping, who died when I was in college and sort of looked at this historical leader from a perspective of different voices and things. And that was because I was learning about that in East Asian Studies. But I was able to process that through working in visual text. So I'm a believer in that. And then, when I started to get into education, I really started to look at these amazing young people that we were educating who were non native speakers of English doing the International Baccalaureate, a very rigorous curriculum, and many of them had traditional art talent, so had played an instrument for their whole lives or had had amazing drawing skills. And they had all these ideas. And we started to say, look, we've got to make sure we build a program to help students process and make sense of what's going on around them.
Brantley Turner 17:13
And you may know, as a high school educator, I mean, there's no better way to understand what's going on with your high school students than to look at their artwork. Either their painting or their film or their music. I mean, it just, it's where they share themselves. It's where they deal with a lot of their stresses and anxieties and troubles. And it was so important to me that we had that space. Again, context, creating art is quite political, and can be quite controversial. And so when we say cutting edge, we say, how do we create a space. In our case at school, it was to put all of our shows in our garage underground, and have opportunities to come together and look at art, but not worry so much about whether that art was being shown publicly.
Melissa Milner 17:54
So you found a way for students to share without it being a risk. So interesting.
Brantley Turner 18:00
And we've had many alumni from the program go on to to do wonderful work in the arts here in the US and the UK, etc. Canada in college.
Melissa Milner 18:08
That's great. So are there arts classes do they have? Is there drama? Is there dance is there at all, all the different arts?
Brantley Turner 18:17
Yeah, so two aspects. One would be curricular options. So in the IB Diploma Program, you have students who can take visual art, film, theater, and design technology, which sort of science and art, as well as music. So definitely offering comprehensive, assessed, you know, global curriculum standard in the arts and making as many classes available as possible. I'm also a big believer that a lot of the critical thinking that's required to get through a program like the IB, is developed in art classes, because you gotta critique, you gotta talk about work.
Melissa Milner 18:52
Yes.
Brantley Turner 18:52
Got to look at what other people have done. So number one, right, access to classes, even if those classes aren't big, you know, sometimes you got to just make the decision that the school is going to prioritize running those classes, even if not as many students take them.
Melissa Milner 19:04
That's great.
Brantley Turner 19:05
Yeah, so that's a huge piece. And then there's the extracurricular element, which allows for the arts to come alive in school. So that's, you know, art seasons, development of activities, where members of the community who are not doing arts courses can also enjoy the arts. A value too, in China, particularly with our musical ensembles, so be they orchestra or band, is making sure that we valued traditional instruments, and I think people in any context they are in should make sure to maintain the development of an interest in traditional instruments. And so we did a lot of fusion where I mean, that's not the official term, right, but where we would have piano and a ruan or a pipa and instruments playing modern, you know, pop, but using instruments to showcase those and some of those instruments are not fully dying, but certainly on their way to extinction. And so I think making that space. Our students had the opportunity to perform every other year at Carnegie Hall before the pandemic, we would bring groups to play here in New York. And we always made sure to showcase at least one piece that that shared traditional instruments to share that with our broader Dwight community of students from other countries.
Melissa Milner 20:18
It's sort of getting into the global thinking piece of it. What are the key elements of educating global thinkers, global citizens?
Brantley Turner 20:26
It's such an important question. And obviously complicated, I think, part of my approach to young people in terms of defining what it means to be a global citizen pushing that boundary, I, I really force the gray and sort of relish it. I am very comfortable with, without definitive answers. It's you've got to distinguish fact from conjecture or opinion. You've got to harness the power of narrative, right, storytelling. I mean, you're generous with your time on the podcast to say, hey, talk to me about you, you know, and I think a lot of young people globally are not asked questions about their narrative and their storytelling and making space for whatever those stories are. In the pandemic, globally, we a lot of folks talk about VUCA, right, the kind of volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world that we are in, I lived in that in China for decades, right? This kind of VUCA, this Vuca situation. And so for me, what that is, is being okay with paradox, sitting with conflicting ideas, and trying to come to an understanding of what those mean to you, like I say all the time in our organization, you got to get it right not be right. If we spend all of our time focusing on being right, then we may fail to get it right. And I'm very afraid of echo chambers, very uncomfortable with groupthink. I've experienced a lot on both sides of the pond.
Brantley Turner 21:57
And I don't feel comfortable when people can't share things that may be disturbing to others, but that we really need to come to resolution together on and so kind of last beyond that is just sort of saying we need a global ethics. I think one of the one of the big challenges that we face in the world right now is that, yes, in certain environments, there's going to be more expedient morality. I'm not going to advocate for that, but but the same time as to who's to say which ethics are gonna govern how we all live as citizens on the planet, ethics for the planet for protecting our natural environment. Pandemics, poverty, those are global issues, they are borderless, and if we don't start coming together, in terms of our ethical understanding of those challenges, I think we've got bigger, bigger issues on our hands. So just to tie that, finally back to the arts and why I think the arts are so critical for global citizens is empathy. If you don't understand or care about other people, then you're not at a starting point to talk about big challenges, ethics and paradox, like whoa, you think that yikes, you know, geez, let me figure this out. And when things become so tribal, and so in conflict, and people stop talking to each other, I mean, goodness, where do we go from there? So I take all of this global citizenry as a model also for how we should function in our own communities.
Brantley Turner 23:20
And I think I don't see leaders in that. That's what disturbs me. And I think I think the United States does a lot of things abroad that are worth evaluating. There's no question. China, has a huge initiative called the Belt and Road Initiative, which is having massive impact on on the global south and other parts of the world, particularly with regard to natural resources. I mean, this is stuff that we you've got to support young people and understanding comprehensively and getting engaged in. You know, one thing that's fun is just like from a how do you talk about these massive issues, and you want to engage young people, high school students, you know, what you do you talk about their phone, the phone, there's, there's the rare earth metals that are in the phone, all of the production of the phone, which is on a global footprint. You want to start with what you're holding in your hand. Well, let's talk about how that was made. Right? I think that they're critical, complex topics that we can understand just using t shirt. How does a t shirt get made t shirt goes to seven different countries before you get it in New York. Cotton. Why did Why does a lot of the cotton come from the US? Well, we subsidize farming here. So will we continue to? How will farmers be affected and the world is so cool, you know, there's so many interesting things to learn staying curious. And the other aspect of it is staying optimistic. I think I love to be places that feel optimistic and seeking those opportunities out was really important to me. I feel like it's, you know how to stay sane.
Melissa Milner 24:44
Yes. So speaking of staying sane, what are you zooming in on right now?
Brantley Turner 24:50
Right now, the...I had an opportunity in July due to a new position the global part of the global team, but focused on East Asia education direction for Dwight schools, we are in the process of starting a school in Hanoi, Vietnam, as I mentioned, and that's what I've got most of my energy focused on at the moment. So I am spending a lot of time in Vietnam and will be relocating to Hanoi in northern Vietnam next year.
Melissa Milner 25:18
Wow.
Brantley Turner 25:18
That's the big project on hand. And it's really fascinating. I mean, I'm, I'm in a situation right, where I don't speak the language. And certainly, as a US citizen, understanding Vietnam is a very interesting conversation here in the United States, and also there. And we have a very different history with Vietnam than we do with China. Vietnam has a long history with China. And I feel like I've been given a huge gift, just go explore. I definitely want to try to get things right, as opposed to impose my lack of understanding on others there. But it's, it's exciting.
Melissa Milner 25:55
Is that starting from scratch, or is that through...
Brantley Turner 25:58
Total Greenfield? 100%. Greenfield School, and it will be a pre K through 12 school. So in China, just to get back to your earlier point in China, it's so regulated in grade one through nine education, that that is why we only did a high school. In Vietnam, it's also regulated, but differently regulated, s=and so we will be able to go pre K through 12.
Melissa Milner 26:18
Oh, very interesting. So what is your work right now? You say you're zooming in on that, right? What are you doing right now? Are you researching? Are you writing curriculum? Like what are you doing?
Brantley Turner 26:30
I am hiring teachers to be the inaugural class of incoming teachers for grades one through five, I've got 28 people to hire both teachers and leaders for the primary school, which we call Lower School at Dwight School, Hanoi. I am working on what the expectations around curriculum integration are going to look like. So we will apply to be an International Baccalaureate school. That's P yp MYP and DP curriculum, but because it will be in Vietnam, the way the licensure works to educate Vietnamese national, there will be some integration expectation, primarily around learning Vietnamese language. So I am going to try to learn, I would say the research phase is understanding what needs to happen from a curriculum integration perspective. And other than that, it's just listening to focus groups with parents and hiring local administrators, and dealing with a building, the interiors, the working with the construction team, working with architects. It's such an amazing project. And we have a really fantastic chairman who's Vietnamese, and is a real visionary in in Vietnam, and just feel privileged, frankly. The architect for the exterior, Carlos Zapata, is a well known Venezuelan architect, who lives in New York and just, I've been so jazzed by the enthusiasm for education, and particularly in Vietnam, where they're still in the process of developing and providing local opportunities. And the fact that parents want their their children to go abroad for university to continue to gain new experiences, again, to me, I see that as really important relationship building. And you know, it's kind of my aspect of diplomacy, I guess.
Melissa Milner 28:15
That's absolutely amazing. It's incredible. It blows me away what you do. Overwhelming, how can people reach you if they want to learn more about your work or if they want to get involved with what you're doing?
Brantley Turner 28:27
I spent so many years behind the firewall in China that I'm kind of less active on social media, maybe than a lot of people. But certainly LinkedIn is a good option. So just Brantley Turner, on LinkedIn, and anytime through the Dwight schools, so just the dwight.edu can can find me easily, but I love to connect and certainly anybody who's interested in learning more or telling me what I'm doing wrong, I'm open to any kind of feedback.
Melissa Milner 28:53
That's amazing. So thank you. Thank you so much.
Brantley Turner 28:56
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And it's a pleasure to talk to you.
Melissa Milner 29:01
For my blog, transcripts of this episode, and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner and I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap.